New Year ‘friends’

Happy New Year and let me wish the readers of this column great reading time all the way!

Let us take this opportunity to resolve that we will read many more of the very best books and ‘acquire’ many more great friends in the New Year!

To use a cliché, books can be steadier and better friends than any friend in flesh and blood.

Someone wrote recently that it has become nowadays a ‘routine fashion’ to discuss books you have never read and never intend to read! Some of us “make the best use” of the latest books by flaunting our ‘knowledge’ obtained from secondary sources as if we have just come out of a good and serious reading of the books. Very silly and bully!

When I say ‘happy reading’, I do not mean that I will have some great books to recommend. But, I suppose, there is no harm if I tell you what I may read in the months to come. I remember having read a book, Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C Clarke with great greed to have as much as possible in as little time as possible. It is a book that makes you feel ‘futuristic and forward-looking’ by the very nature of its contents.

He has written several other books too on the Rama line, like Rama Revealed and The Garden of Rama. Rama willing, I am going to “devour” most of them and be in line with the great God!

Among the so-called great recent books, I haven’t read quite a few. They are: In the Garden of Beasts by Eric Larson; No Easy Day by Mark Owen and Kevin Maurer; Proof of Heaven by Eben Alexander; Fifty Shades of Grey by EL James; and Heaven is For Real by Todd Burpo and Lynn Vincent.

Hope, these are the books that may make one wiser to understand the complications of life and help ride the rough patches on one’s journey smoothly.